Future of Trust

Ambient extraction is different. It’s a level of vulnerability and theft that registers more emotionally and psychically than it does economically, and that will tip the scales of culture and business.

And if you don’t feel it yet, you may be on the benefitting side of the asymmetry.

When extraction becomes this pervasive, people opt out. They go dark and build walls around what matters to them.

And this is already happening. You can see it in the shift from public social media to close friends lists. In the rise of group chats, Discord servers, and paid Substacks. In people using fake names and burner accounts as default. In

Minimize your surface area. Don’t click, don’t share data and don’t feed the algorithm. Find safer, under the radar places for genuine exchange.

My job is helping people who are building the future understand the cultural and emotional systems shaping it and right now, the problem is we are still building for an economy of participation when we're entering an economy where participation itself has become the liability.

Reciprocal transparency. If you can see me, I should be able to see you. Not your marketing copy, but your actual ownership structure, how you make money, what you do with my data, who benefits from my participation. The asymmetry has to collapse. This is what Signal figured out early. If you’re going to ask people to trust you with their

Consent as infrastructure. Not buried in Terms of Service that no one reads, but built into the product itself. Opt-out by default. Clear value exchanges. The ability to leave and take your data with you. Apple did this with App Tracking Transparency when they made consent visible and revocable. Users opted out en masse because for the first time,

Finite games over infinite extraction. People are exhausted by platforms that treat them as renewable resources. There’s a reason why people are willing to pay for newsletters, for Substacks and Discord communities, for anything that feels like a bounded exchange rather than an infinite scroll designed to keep them producing value. Substack

Trust collapses at scale, but it doesn’t get rebuilt at scale. It comes back in small circles and places where the asymmetry can’t take hold. The ambient extraction economy doesn’t need to take over the world for this to matter, it just needs to drive enough people into withdrawal that your old playbooks stop working.

If you’re building anything that requires trust, participation, or voluntary engagement from real people, you need to decide if you’re extracting or building entry.